The pure materiality of the fact: Studies in literature and politics (Husserl, Derrida, Nancy)

The following studies attempt to locate, in the field of literature and politics, the possibility of what Jacques Derrida called, in his first published text, a "pure materiality of the Fact." This materiality, subtracted from classical concepts of matter, is identified with an eventness irreducible to any constituted sense. Arriving at this singular figure of the material requires a passage through the straits of the phenomenological method and a submission to the trial of phenomenology. Only by "suspending" the naive or thetic relation to reference---an operation Husserl calls the transcendental reduction---does it become possible to approach this materiality while preventing its identification with any "worldly" or metaphysical concept of matter.; The first long chapter of this dissertation addresses the very complex relationship Derrida had with Marxism via this concept of "pure" materiality. Starting with his earliest student work, Derrida's trajectory is here read against the possibility of a secret or cryptic "alliance" between Marxism and transcendental idealism---what he calls his "crypto-communism"---which undertakes a transformation of an entire constellation of Marxist tropes: dialectics and matter, economy and property, philosophy as political intervention, and the intimacy between religion and ideology. The second chapter turns to literature and specifically a dual between two types of space: the simple extension of geometric space and what Mallarme, Blanchot and Derrida call the space of literature, a space that "spaces and disseminates itself" (Mallarme). Opposing this scriptural "volume" to the flatness of the pure, non-sensible space of mathematics, Derrida is here shown both to develop his theory of literature in strict correlation with his first reflections on Husserl's "Origin of Geometry," while at the same time identifying the literary suspension of reference with Husserl's transcendental reduction.; The final short chapter on Jean-Luc Nancy has as its center a reflection on the possibility of a mode of collective existence that would come to supplant the classical figures of Marxism while being cross-referenced with any number of contemporary thinkers working in the space left free by Marx (Badiou, Agamben, Negri, Derrida). Here, again, Husserl and the questions of transcendental intersubjectivity and primordial temporalization become the key to engaging what "we," today, might mean.